Actually, I have made my mind up. I’m going for a Blackberry Bold, which I will talk more about once I have it and confirm it does everything I want.

One part of me really wanted to get an iPhone, the part that is enjoying the whole “Mac” experience. To my way of thinking there is no falsehood to the statement that Apple currently exceeds everyone in terms of usability, and that is hard to give up. I am sure that I’d spend more time exploring and trying new things out on the iPhone than I will on the Bold.

But what I really need is industrial-strength email: I need to be able to selectively configure alerts so for certain kinds of messages the phone will bleep continuously/flash lights/fire rockets. The iPhone has basically one setting: beep or not beep. It beeps once, for email apparently rather anemically, then never beeps again. The basic premise: the iPhone is really a portable computer, not a mission-critical notification device. And one of the primary jobs of this device for me is that notification process.

I also understand that Blackberry has invested a great deal in highly robust email delivery, whereas the iPhone… not so much. And then there is the fact that the Bold has a replaceable battery. That has always seemed like a rather essential thing to me for a phone to have, even though I’ve only had a couple of phones long enough that battery replacement became necessary (the Razr was one).

I suspect some of the things that are missing from the iPhone, particularly more sophisticated email alerting, will be fixed once they get notification push working for non-Apple software. That will probably happen later this year, and a year or two from now there will be lots of choices. But I’m not choosing a phone six months or a year from now, and there are no guarantees that Apple will recognize the shortfall- they are focussed on a different market than the Blackberry.